In an article with this subhead: “The Ubuntu Linux project hopes to release a groundbreaking product later this year…”

I see this Shuttleworth quote:

“So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a first flirt with multiarch [multiple architecture] support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing on AMD64, the interesting possibilities of the SMART package manager… and other pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly on the horizon”

Hmm, yes. Pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly on the horizon, or, alternatively, which have been in one or more of your competitors’ products for months now. Welcome to the present, Mark. Still, I wish I knew what magic button you have to press to get major sites to release puff pieces like this as ‘news stories’ without even doing any checking to see what the rest of the Linux world is doing…

jkeller – I like the way you think! I wonder if I could put a trip to Mars on expenses…

yoho – I agree (although the plumbing for multiarch seems to work rather well, the main problems with x86-64 are to do with x86-64 packages). There’s some improvements to urpmi’s multiarch behaviour in Cooker, I believe, and I know there’s some work happening on Xen for Corporate 4; I’ll see if we can get that to filter back to the main distro.

I think that Ubuntu has some interesting backedns to help in the distribution. I really like the way Rosetta works for example (the project they use to translate the applications of the distribution, a web application that is referenced from every tool in Ubuntu),

Or the way they manage they objectives, well planned. Hey, they really know where they want to go and what they want to achieve.

Mandriva has nothing similar. And, yes, i think Ubuntu Linux is a step behind now. But could be a step ahead in just 6 months (XGL is not going to be officially in Mandriva Linux 2007, so waits to 2008, and like that another technologies).

For me, what Ubuntu has created is a really good infraestructure (launchpad, with the Rosetta translation web application, etc). And getting some ideas from there for Mandriva it’s not only a good idea. I think is a must!

Oh, I’m not criticising Ubuntu itself – in many ways it’s a fine distro. This entry was merely about the odd choice of ‘groundbreaking’ technologies Mark made, and the sadly uncritical way in which ZDnet reported it.

I don’t get the obsession with XGL. It’s pure eye candy which as of yet does absolutely nothing for anyone’s actual productivity. Personally I’ve got precisely zero interest in it and I’d much rather Boiko spent his time on more fundamentally important tasks than including a fancy but ultimately pointless graphical hack layer.